I am an assistant professor concentrating in modernist studies. My current book project, Modernism’s Agile Crowds, focuses on the figured crowds of British and Irish modernism and on modern and contemporary theories of democracy and collective identification and action. I also hold general interests in critical, postcolonial, and cultural theory, intersectional work in feminism, gender, race, and sexuality, media and technology studies, and literature and environment. I have published articles on Joyce, Conrad, Wilde, and modernist feminisms and environmentalisms. At UBC, I teach courses in global Anglophone literatures, Modernism, and theory, alongside specialized undergraduate and graduate courses in my research fields.

I received an M.A. (2008) and Ph.D. (Dec. 2013) in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a B.A. s.c.l. in English and Education from the University of Scranton. Please find more information about my work and interests at blogs.ubc.ca/jpaltin.

I teach graduate and undergraduate courses in the Department of English in Modernism, 20th-century studies, literary and cultural theory, and historical surveys of Anglophone literature. My undergraduate students have called me “a great instructor,” “very knowledgeable,” “energetic,” “approachable,” and said my courses have “great content” and are “thought provoking.” My teaching is built on a commitment to educational equity that provides a diverse body of university students with a climate of high expectation and useful scaffolding, asking students to take creativity-enhancing intellectual risks in response to challenging assignments. I welcome graduate projects in Modernism (understood broadly), twentieth-century postcolonial, cultural, and material studies, intersectional work in feminism, gender, race, and sexuality, ecocriticism, and media and technology studies.

A writing-intensive introduction to the disciplines of literary studies through the exploration of texts in their critical and theoretical contexts. Fulfils the first-year component of the Faculty of Arts Writing and Research Requirement. Open only to students in the Faculty of Arts. Recommended for students intending to become English majors. Essays are required.

Literary experimentation in 19th to 20th century movements known as modernism. Includes interdisciplinary approaches to literary, performance, and media arts, and intellectual and social histories of the period.

Book Reviews, Other

“Adaptive Anxieties: Strategic Confrontations in Eco-Joyce” (review of Brazeau, Robert, and Derek Gladwin. Eco-Joyce: The Environmental Imagination of James Joyce. Cork: Cork University Press, 2014). Journal of Ecocriticism: A New Journal of Nature, Society, and Literature 8.1 (March 2018), 10-12.

“Temporizing Modernities: Review of Nicholas, Jane, The Modern Girl: Feminism Modernities, the Body, and Commodities in the 1920s and Gifford, James, Personal Modernisms: Anarchist Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes,” Canadian Literature 225, 141-2. (in print May 2016)

“’Patternmind’ and ‘paradigmatic ear’: Reading Joyce a long the Krommerun at the XXIV International James Joyce Symposium, Utrecht University, 15-20 June 2014,” The James Joyce Literary Supplement 28.2, Winter 2015.

My research pursues queries about queer, minor and collectivist performances at the intersection of literary, social and cultural theory. My recent work analyzes verbal figurations of imagined communities, and critiques the social production of adherences and identifications. My fields include 20th century British, Irish and South Asian literatures in English, modernism, critical and cultural theory, literature and environment, literature and mind, and critical university studies. My current monograph is in review under the provisional title Modernism’s Agile Crowds. The project discovers a genealogy of the contemporary political multitude in literary modernism’s representations of crowds, and focuses on the crowd’s status as a strategic political articulation acting in competition with established imagined communities. It compares verbal figurations produced during the period named to models operating in the realms of psychoanalysis, political philosophy and social theory. It posits that these figurations taken together constitute a coherent, intertextualized project among a group of modernist writers which aspires to anatomize the modern crowd, to explore alternative collective forms of experience, and to imagine the crowd’s futurity. It proposes a reading of the fictional crowd that offers a fresh account of its sense of authorization and efficacy, concluding that the crowd recognizes itself as an agile network that supervises its own world-making and negotiates its material and cultural exchanges.